Electrically conductive polymers are increasingly finding application in electrical and electronic devices, for example, as organic electrodes and the like. Enhanced conductivity is desirable to lower dissipation and, more generally, to meet the needs of more demanding applications. Electrically conductive polymers are commonly made by electropolymerization at an electrode. Typically, essentially insoluble films are produced from suitable unsaturated reactant materials forming conjugated polymer chains. The polymer chains can be made conductive, or more conductive, by doping with known materials, such as iodine, AsF.sub.6 anions, etc. The dopant is thought to facilitate the transfer of charge (electrons or holes) along the conjugated polymer chain or, to a limited extent, from one polymer chain to another. Conductivity is thought to be limited by such chain-to-chain hopping processes. In principle, higher conductivities would perhaps be achievable by increasing the length of the conjugated polymer chains. If conjugated chains suitable for conductive polymers are made by electrode polymerization of reactant monomers in a good solvent for the short polymer chains, they will dissolve from the surface of the electrode into the solvent resulting in disadvantageously short polymer chains. Typically, electropolymerization synthesis procedures result in relatively short conjugation length.
Also, the polymerization process typically generates polymers with a certain level of defects in the conjugation, for example, through the introduction of sp.sup.3 carbons into the backbone of the polymer intended to be conjugated entirely through unsaturated sp.sup.2 and/or sp sites. Such defects in the polymerization process limit the conductivity of the polymer material. Conductive polymers may be prepared using conventional solution based polymerization processes. These processes are known to suffer potentially the disadvantage of generating the above mentioned sp.sup.3 defects in the polymer backbone, reducing the conductivity of the polymer.
The use of electropolymerization to produce conducting polypyrrole polymer films is discussed by Diaz et al in Electrochemistry of Conducting Polypyrrole Films, J. Electroanal. Chem., 129 (1981) 115-132. The Diaz et al article describes the electropolymerization reaction process and reports the production of polypyrrole polymer films which are highly conducting when in the oxidized state. Specifically, polypyrrole polymer films are prepared by electropolymerization of pyrrole on a platinum electrode surface in an acetonitrile electrolyte solution. In addition, the preparation of poly-N-methylpyrrole and poly-N-phenylpyrrole films are described.